Don't Freeze-Dry the Littles

Nov 7

Nov 7 Don't Freeze-Dry the Littles

I threatened to freeze-dry my kids at certain ages—two, three, five, seven—those times when they are adorable, when their understanding of the world is so magical. I longed to hold them there, to hold me there. Like fall leaves and summer light, I long to linger in those ephemeral moments.

The word ephemeral is a poem. Short-lived comes out dark and clipped. Even the word seasonal hisses like spitting, icy rain. But ephemeral begins with the first two syllables of effeminate, a touch of softness. If you slide over the a in the last syllable (that would rhyme the word with wall, stall, and pall), it gently rhymes with pearl, curl, and unfurl. Ephemeral rolls from the lips softly as a seep of melting snow, round as the earth’s breast, precious as a newborn’s breath.

My son-in-law calls it the ‘rock star welcome’ when I arrive to provide daycare for my granddaughters. Two-year-old Ailish knocks on the entry way door calling ‘hello, Giggy, hello.” Her small knuckles make an impatient tat-tat-tat at ear level when I’m bent over, taking off my shoes. When I finally swing back the door, she throws her arms in the air and yells, “Giggy!” Six-month-old Sive jumps and jumps in her daddy’s arms, her toothless grin of pure joy aimed at me. This won’t last forever. Often, even before I can scoop Ailish up for a hug, she’s dashed off to chase the dog. Sive’s face crumples when she realizes Daddy is handing her off to me.

Recently, Ailish and I got lost in autumn woods for an hour. I knew where we were but my daughter, Celin, didn’t. And I’d left my phone on her couch. First, we ran to what Ailish calls the drive-ee (I call it the trail). Twenty ambling steps down the track, Ailish stopped. “What that noise?” It was a small woodpecker, a Downy, rapping its beak on the scales of a young red pine. When Ailish doesn’t quite catch a word, she hums through it. She held a conversation with the woodpecker and me. “I say, hmmmpeckuh what you doing? You banging you head. Stop that!”

The bird didn’t scare quickly. We watched and talked about it eating ants and banging its beak. When Ailish wants us to notice something she says “it’s kinda cute.” A TV remote might be ‘kinda cute.’ But so is her favorite dress, her baby sister, and any stuffed animal. The woodpecker rated many ‘kinda cutes.’ It flitted to several more trees ahead of us. Eventually, we moved beyond it to the rock with a heart-shaped quartz circle, then jumped over ‘snakes’ which I finally realized were tree shadows thrown across the trail by the late sun. She didn’t repeat chewing on birch catkins as she had a few days before, but she collected pinecones, rocks, and a stick. Maroon maple leaves in our path were more than ‘kinda cute,’ they were ‘boo-full!’ She collected a bouquet of them for me to carry with the other things.

We reached the end of the trail where I thought we’d turn back, where I said we’d turn back, but another green and gold trail spun itself down a hill with stepping rocks for Ailish to test. Her tiny pink crocs were in what her mother calls 4-wheel—the straps across her Achilles tendons. The skirt on her short dress flared like wings. Around a bend was a hill we had to top in order to see what was beyond it. From the crest we were beckoned to the next hillside because late sunlight threw snakes across it.

Finally, we both agreed it was time to turn around. Somewhere along the way, I heard my daughter yell, “Mom!” I yelled back and Ailish called ‘hello!’ in a surprisingly loud voice. But we were below a cutbank—a ‘mountain’ Ailish called it. Our voices must not have carried because we were almost back when a frantic mother pushing a stroller at a bouncing clip, infant Sive aboard, met us.

I’ve been on the frantic end of a potentially missing person. Celin herself, at Ailish’s age, had no fear of the woods we lived in. Twice she disappeared for a lifetime (twenty minutes at least) while we searched for her. Just a few days before I wandered off with Ailish, I’d gotten turned around (Celin says LOST) on the same trails. We’d been gone four times as long as she thought we’d be. Her fear was totally justified. But I couldn’t convince her I was sorry. Joy just will spill out of a person like sweat.

Time spent with Littles is stickier than fruit snacks. Relief still floods my body when I remember finding three-year-old Celin, sleeping under a blanket in my parents’ RV. She’d somehow slipped out of the house and climbed into their camper, then clambered into the bed above the driver’s seat. She slept so soundly she didn’t hear our frantic calls. Gratitude that she was alive probably sounded a lot like anger when I yelled at her for disappearing.

Although I’m with our Littles, Ailish and Sive, almost every day, those moments of wandering a color-splattered woods with my tiny granddaughter were especially precious. As were moments with my daughter when she was tiny (except when she was lost). Now I know, if my kids were freeze-dried at two, beside the fact that re-constituting them might have been problematic, I’d have missed them at eight, twelve, and twenty-four (even fourteen had its charm). I’d have missed my son as a teacher, my daughter as a mother, and Celin’s daughters at two and at six months.

Here in northeastern Minnesota at 47.9 degrees North, long days become very short. Our length of daylight and darkness aren’t so drastic as in the Arctic Circle, but still we swing from the Summer Solstice of 18 hours to the Winter Solstice of barely eight hours of daylight. Some years, I mourn the days beginning to shorten in June. But how silly is that? Smack in the middle of the light I yearned for in December, I’m dreading the return of darkness. Or, walking a woods brilliant with leaves the colors of fire, I rue their loss. Holding my tiny granddaughters, I mourn their growing so quickly.

Borrowing Trouble. My imagination jumps up off the couch of Today and knocks on Tomorrow’s door, not asking for a cup of sugar, but for a pint of vinegar. Which is okay when writing fiction, but in Real Life light and leaves and Littles are hanging out on my stoop waiting for me to return.

Tomorrow can keep its portions of vinegar and sugar. Today is ephemeral and oh so sweet.

This is L in my alphabetical list of gratitude. What love-rooted things are you grateful for that begin with L?